If you ask him, he&#39;ll tell you he&#39;s no big-government Massachusetts liberal.
But the more Americans learn about what Sen. John Kerry wants to do if he is elected president in November, the more they understand he is a true tax-and-spender.

So it is with his health-care proposals.

Making an impassioned plea to get some 44 million uninsured Americans coverage is one thing, but such coverage must be paid for by somebody.

In John Kerry&#39;s world, that somebody is anybody who earns a living.

According to a study of Kerry&#39;s plan by the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), it would cost American taxpayers &#036;1 trillion over the next decade alone, just to insure the two-thirds of Americans who are currently without coverage.

Worse, his plan "would virtually destroy the individual and small-group health insurance markets" while "most Americans would not be able to remain in the private health plan they have today," said the study&#39;s authors, John Goodman and Devon Herrick.

There are more problems with Kerry&#39;s plan:

* More than half the money it would take to fund Kerry&#39;s ambitious plan would go to subsidize moving people already in private insurance plans to publicly funded plans by expanding Medicaid and State Children&#39;s Health Insurance Programs (CHIP) for the poor.
* Employers also would get taxpayer-provided subsidies, even if they didn&#39;t insure a single additional employee.
* People going from private plans to government-funded plans like Medicaid would end up with fewer choices among doctors, longer waits at doctors&#39; offices and clinics, and medical care rationing.
* Others would be exposed to a system of managed competition that over-provides care to healthy people while underserving sick and poor people.
* It would "almost certainly" lead to a new round of health-care inflation, while federal spending alone would increase by about &#036;100 billion a year.

"The bottom line is that it&#39;s entirely possible to spend &#036;1 trillion and not reduce the number of uninsured," says Goodman, the NCPA&#39;s president, adding that the quality of care would suffer under the Kerry proposal.

The study also found that since there wouldn&#39;t be any increase in health care providers and suppliers, the additional money would likely simply buy higher health care prices.

While Kerry advocates more government control of medicine via funding mechanisms, others criticize this "socialistic" approach to medicine.

They favor a health care system controlled by physicians, not "managed care" insurance companies, and believe competition created by a system whereby consumers had to pay for care themselves would be a much better alternative. And, they argue, such a "free-market approach" would ultimately drive prices downward.

The concept is described in an essay written by Jacob G. Hornberger, for the Future of Freedom Foundation, a non-partisan organization promoting individual rights.

In his essay "The Real Free-Market Approach to Health Care," Hornberger quotes libertarian-minded economist Ludwig von Mises, who wrote, "Authors of economics books, essays, articles, and political platforms demand interventionist measures before they are taken, but once they have been imposed no one likes them.

"Then everyone — usually even the authorities responsible for them — call them insufficient and unsatisfactory. Generally the demand then arises for the replacement of unsatisfactory interventions by other, more suitable measures. And once the new demands have been met, the same scenario begins all over again."

Says Hornberger, "No words could more accurately describe the nature of America’s so-called health-care crisis. After decades of governmental intervention into the health-care arena, the failures are apparent for all to see. But rather than root out the cause of the problem, Americans are demanding that government do something about it."

Sounds Great in Theory (who could be agaist everyone haveing healthcare?)......

Abysmal and Prohibitively Expensive in Practice (no one wants 85% Taxation to support "everyone" and social medicine has MANY flaws even in the best cases)......

Socialism, in so many ways, sounds so good, in a Utopian kind of way. Sadly, reality always gets in the way, and NOTHING is ever free in this world. In the real world, we are bteer off speniding our money to help epople help themselves, rather than to try to help them directly. Welfare, in all it&#39;s forms, simply doesn&#39;t work.

Hey...James Carvile had the answer yesterday...when asked "how will kerri make the world safer?" Carvile responded.."he will take the &#036;200Bill from the Iraq war and use it for social security, education and social programs&#33;&#33;" ...and that is no lie&#33;

Yup, just like the ruin the 40 year Democratic Congress put us in, never balancing a budget, 18% Interest 18% Inflation. A REAL quagmire of a winnable war too. They didnt care about leaving a deficit for me, which I helped pay off by paying increased Clinton taxes. But I forgot you babies were in nappies then.

Originally posted by flushingjet@Sep 10 2004, 09:22 PM Yup, just like the ruin the 40 year Democratic Congress put us in, never balancing a budget, 18% Interest 18% Inflation. A REAL quagmire of a winnable war too. They didnt care about leaving a deficit for me, which I helped pay off by paying increased Clinton taxes. But I forgot you babies were in nappies then.

Not ALL of us were Babies then FJ..How old are you Ancient one?? :lol:

Originally posted by savage69+Sep 10 2004, 09:00 PM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (savage69 @ Sep 10 2004, 09:00 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-flushingjet@Sep 10 2004, 09:22 PM Yup, just like the ruin the 40 year Democratic Congress put us in, never balancing a budget, 18% Interest 18% Inflation. A REAL quagmire of a winnable war too. They didnt care about leaving a deficit for me, which I helped pay off by paying increased Clinton taxes. But I forgot you babies were in nappies then.

Not ALL of us were Babies then FJ..How old are you Ancient one?? :lol: [/b][/quote]
Savage:
Stop scaring off the newbies. He isn&#39;t into it man, leave him alone.

Savage:
Stop scaring off the newbies. He isn&#39;t into it man, leave him alone.

He doesn&#39;t look old if that is him in his avatar. And btw why don&#39;t you patriotic conservatives give him &#036;hit for befowling lady liberty.

That aint Lady Liberty, I believe thats that crazy Giant fan who goes around dressing up like shes important. When I went to the draft, some lady dressed like Lady liberty and wore this unbelievably revealing outfit with some Miami Hurricane BS on it. If she was young I wouldnt mind, but shes pretty damn old and her husband aint young eithe,.rt